Ron Andrews, president of medical sciences at Life
Technologies, adds, "We are pleased to be partnered with Exosome Diagnostics as
they develop their non-invasive cancer diagnostic programs. Our
medical
sciences strategy is focused on partnerships with emerging companies that have
promising molecular diagnostic applications that enable the
realization of
personalized medicine in diseases like cancer."

Exosome is developing a series of
urine- and blood-based
molecular diagnostic tests for use in cancer detection and monitoring. The
company's technology can isolate a highly pure,
stable preparation of
ribonucleic acids from biofluids for analysis on existing analytical platforms
such as qPCR and next-generation sequencing. The
company is currently in the
process of partnering with various manufacturing groups to provide branded, OEM
in-vitro diagnostic solutions for
regulatory approval and use in the company's GLP CLIA-certified laboratory.

"This agreement
with Life Technologies continues our pursuit
of best-in-class partnerships that include the Prostate Cancer Foundation,
Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure (ABC2) and the broad group of leading clinical
investigators now collaborating on exosome technology," says James McCullough,
Exosome's CEO. "Life Technologies is leading the way in personalized
medicine
and provides us with the type of customer service and robust technology that
are prerequisites to the successful launch of innovative
molecular
diagnostics."

Exosomes are shed into all biofluids, including blood, urine
and
cerebrospinal fluid, forming a stable source of intact, disease-specific
nucleic acids. The eponymous company's proprietary exosome technology makes use
of this natural stability to achieve high sensitivity for rare gene transcripts
and the expression of genes responsible for cancers and other
diseases.

Exosome is commercializing in-vitro diagnostic tests for use in companion
diagnostic
applications and real-time monitoring of disease. Earlier this year, the
company announced a collaboration with ABC2 and unnamed academic
medical
centers to accelerate clinical validation of Exosome's blood and cerebrospinal
fluid-based molecular diagnostics technology in brain cancer.
The collaboration
will explore the capabilities of Exosome RNA biofluid-based diagnostic
technology for early identification, progression monitoring
and disease-risk
stratification in glioma, the most common and deadly form of brain cancer.

In two
clinical studies, also completed this year, results
demonstrated the potential utility of non-invasive sampling of patients' urine
to detect and
manage prostate cancer. In the first study, the presence of a
prostate cancer-specific biomarker in exosomes collected from random patients'
urine
samples demonstrated a strong correlation to the presence of that marker
in prostate tissue removed via radical prostatectomy. The study also correlated
the expression level of the marker in urine with the likelihood of a positive
cancer biopsy. In the second study, urinary exosomes demonstrated
elevated
levels of survivin messenger RNA from patients with castration-resistant
prostate cancer following primary therapy. Survivin expression has
been
implicated in hormone-independent prostate cancer growth.

Life
Technologies and OpGen to develop microbial outbreak
solutions

CARLSBAD, Calif.—Life
Technologies Corp. also announced last
month that it has signed a collaborative agreement with OpGen Inc. to develop
systems, technologies and applications intended to improve the management and
surveillance of microbial outbreaks in the public health and infectious disease
markets.

The
collaboration will focus on developing applications and
analysis systems that enable the use of the companies' Whole Genome Mapping and
Ion Torrent
sequencing technologies for food outbreak and infectious disease
analysis. OpGen's Whole Genome Mapping technology provides a rapid,
comprehensive
structural analysis of microbial genomes that, when combined with
sequencing data, more accurately detects important novel genetic elements
associated
with toxicity, virulence and drug resistance.

As part of the collaboration, Life Technologies will
also
join the public health consortium recently established by OpGen to evaluate
Whole Genome Mapping and sequencing for confirmation and management of
disease
outbreaks.

"Life Technologies is the ideal partner to demonstrate the
value of next-
generation sequencing in the public health and hospital
laboratory," said Douglas White, CEO of OpGen. "OpGen's Whole Genome Mapping
technologies,
in conjunction with the Ion Torrent system, will provide a valuable
new approach that will provide public health and clinical laboratories access
to
cutting-edge technologies for microbial analysis and outbreak management."

"Just six months after
we launched the PGM and released the
first semiconductor sequencing chip, scientists in China and Germany used Ion's
technology to decode the genome
of the deadly German E. coli outbreak strain and rapidly identify its unique
combination of toxins and virulence genes," said Gregg Fergus,
president of Ion
Torrent, part of Life Technologies. "We are excited to be collaborating with
OpGen because of their focus on delivering improved
infectious disease
detection capabilities to PGM and Whole Genome Mapping enabled laboratories on
a global basis. The PGM is the only sequencing
platform with the speed,
simplicity and scalability to allow public health officials to intervene in
ongoing infectious disease outbreaks."